Neither economic considerations nor individual processes can explain happiness, according to economists and psychologists. Happiness can be studied alongside other social processes, networks, and connections in sociology.
Although happiness is considered a personal state of mind, it is not fully independent of our social environment. How happy, satisfied, and self-confident can we be if we lack a close social environment, if events make our family, neighbours, and close friends unhappy, and if services like education, health, and security are lacking?
Emile Durkheim, a key sociology creator, taught us to explain social phenomena with social phenomena. Therefore, just as social dynamics cause seemingly individual problems like unemployment, illness, poverty, suicide, and dissatisfaction with work and life, a person's social environment and structures also shape their happiness.
In this short post, I will first explain the difficult relationship between sociology and a subjective issue like happiness, then discuss how sociology might contribute to happiness research.
Sociology, which investigates social phenomena, has been nearly utterly indifferent to happiness. Sociology textbooks rarely discuss happiness, with a few exceptions.
The amount of sociological studies on happiness is minuscule compared to psychologists and economists. Despite sociology's grim outlook, the world's most significant happiness scientist is a sociologist, which is good news for the field.
According to Veenhoven, many sociologists study social equality, stratification, and harmony for ideological reasons. These studies assume that when a society's wellbeing falls, so will its happiness and other good features.
Sociologists are confused since the impoverished are happy, regardless of economic status, while the richest cultures are not. Sociologists have shied away from happiness studies due to the discrepancy between ideological assumptions and field facts.
Sociologists have many theoretical challenges when studying happiness. Sociologists consider happiness as a meaningless subject that cannot be assessed objectively, is dependent only on ideas, and falls under mental biology, or psychology, as Auguste Comte described it.
For pragmatic reasons, sociologists are more interested in social interactions than feelings. Explaining social behaviour is simpler than explaining happiness, which is complex and varied. Since Durkheim, sociologists have been interested in pathological phenomena that disrupt social life and aberrant conditions that destroy order.
Sociologists focus on problems that create misery and evil, not good, according to their education. Sociologists struggle to define and experience happiness and a happy existence.
For this reason, sociologists who socialise inside the sociology community rarely try to improve society's excellent situations.